Wastelands -- The Fig Leaf Edition
by nikkilittle
Summary: In 2032, the "Princess of Thieves" leads a revolution against an abstraction. Alternate Universe: a modern, American Alice in a real Wonderland. For this version, all adult content of the original has been deleted and replaced with alternate scenes.
1. Chapter 1

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." -George Orwell

Chapter 1: "The Ruins"

I felt like a damn gargoyle sitting up there. Or maybe the vampire Selene from all those "Underworld" movies. Spread out below me from the window ledge of the abandoned hotel was most of Detroit. The city was a wasteland. There was no other way to describe it. Square mile after square mile of abandoned buildings. Abandoned factories in the industrial zones with weeds growing up through the cracks of empty parking lots. Abandoned skyscrapers in the financial district with their broken windows and ornate revolving doors. The abandoned homes in the residential areas were the spookiest. Half of the homes looked like sure bets to be haunted.

Detroit had no city government. No public services. No police. No fire department. There was no electricity, no water, no sewage. Not a single toilet in the city flushed. The city was so empty that even most of the rats had left. The nearest hospital was more than fifty miles away. Yet there were people here. Inhabiting the upper floors of some of the apartment buildings were squatters. They would catch rainwater in large plastic tubs arrayed on the roofs of the buildings. They grew vegetables in any green spaces nearby. Potatoes, turnips, radishes, and sweet potatoes seemed to be the most common. I saw sorghum growing in some of the larger green spaces. I had learned to appreciate sorghum "popcorn" that was offered to me in homeless encampments throughout the midwest.

The only thing positive I could think of to say about Detroit was that there was nobody there to collect rent. It had been twenty-five years since I had kidnapped the U.S. Senate. The kidnapping had accomplished nothing. Now in 2032, the population had dropped to about 280 million. There had been a die-off among the poor thanks to lack of medical treatment. Medicaid had been cut so many times that the Republicans finally killed it off entirely with little fanfare. Medicare had been replaced with a voucher program that paid for so little that only the upper middle class folk got any benefit. The legal requirement for public hospitals to treat anyone who showed up in the emergency rooms regardless of ability to pay had been eliminated. If you didn't have an insurance card, the public hospitals would let you die in the emergency room. Most hospitals were run by private for-profit medical practices which required all treatments to be preapproved by the insurance companies. The private hospitals were even worse than the public hospitals. If you didn't have insurance, they wouldn't even let you bleed to death in the emergency room: they threw you out onto the sidewalk. The only place left to go was the few remaining Catholic hospitals which were found usually only in a state's largest city. The Catholic Church had struggled to keep at least one hospital open in each state. On the front edifice of every Catholic hospital was the following engraved in bronze: "This hospital treats everyone who enters our doors. None shall be turned away." Since the sex scandals had bankrupted every Catholic parish in the country, there wasn't a single Catholic church open in the entire country. There were a few Catholic school systems remaining in New England. That was about it. The Catholic hospitals were the only remaining presence of Catholicism in most areas of the U.S.

After I had pitched the Angel's Sword into the Capitol Building, the U.S. government moved entirely underground into a bunker that had been built during the "Cold War" with the Soviet Union. The cowards had remained there ever since. There was reputed to be a single way in and out of the bunker, but no one in the public knew where it was. All I needed was one photograph, one YouTube video to create a portal into the bunker. I had been pleading for one for years in YouTube videos, but apparently the underground bunker was so tightly policed that carrying a cell phone inside was certain death. The location of the United States government bunker was the most tightly-held secret on Earth. The Angel's Sword was still stuck in the rock of the remnants of the Capitol Building, its blade still alight. There were sharpshooters located everywhere around it in case I decided to try to retrieve it. People in the homeless encampments had been warning me for years that there were also mines located in the soil within ten feet of the Angel's Sword. I silently pleaded in my mind for the Sword to return to me when I raised my hand within sight of it, but the Sword never returned. Who was it waiting for?

The homeless population was now estimated to be over 25 million. Every state had hundreds of what people had begun to call "Reaganvilles" after the president who had initiated the social darwinist war against the non-rich. It was ironic, in a way, to name the homeless encampments after the actor president: by the standards of the day, he was a liberal. Much too liberal to ever be nominated as a Republican presidential candidate. President Ryan's latest proposed budget cut was the last remaining vestige of the welfare state: food stamps. Those had survived only because farmers constantly squawked that they didn't want to sell their entire crop to foreign buyers. Homeless people weren't eligible for food stamps because they didn't have addresses. There were lots of things homeless people were ineligible for because they lacked addresses: library cards, voting, government employment, camping permits for national parks, fishing licenses, drivers' licenses, demonstration permits, mail service since general delivery had been eliminated, passports, and state identification cards. If you didn't have an address, you didn't exist.

Detroit wasn't the only city that looked like what I just described. Most of Los Angeles, most of Denver, all of St. Louis, all of Cleveland, Ohio, most of New York City, nearly the entire state of New Jersey, most of Houston, and most of Atlanta were also wastelands. Every city had its abandoned industrial zones. The United States looked like a country that had been invaded and conquered. It had been invaded and conquered in a way: the worshippers of Ayn Rand had progressively restricted voting to the point that only the upper middle class and the rich could vote: about 12 percent of the population. For the rest, the United States was a dictatorship.

Yes, there were still pockets of affluence in the United States. Spotless gated areas of mansions, manicured lawns, and upscale boutiques. And Trapwire cameras. Trapwire cameras were the state surveillance cameras that lined the streets in affluent areas and combined with private closed-circuit TV cameras inside private shops and residential homes to create an all-pervasive security zone where someone was always watching and ready to dispatch the police or a SWAT team as necessary. Trapwire created a high-tech police state to protect the assets of the wealthy. Ironically, the areas inhabited by the rich had the best public services in the United States. They even had free libraries. The rich lived in a world apart.

After twenty-five years of robbing grocery stores, I was the most hated woman in the United States. And the most beloved. Newspapers in the wealthy areas recorded all my exploits and the cable news channels featured me nightly as the rich cursed my name with gusto. I could walk into any homeless encampment in the United States utterly without fear and unarmed. The homeless kept up a constant vigil for police infiltrators who were hoping to rid the government of its most wanted terrorist with a single headshot. The homeless had discovered a highly effective method of discouraging the infiltrators: they ate them. If you got caught in a homeless encampment with a police-issued pistol, you were dinner.

There were other changes. Business districts had changed greatly in the past twenty-five years. Fast-food chain restaurants had virtually disappeared. Global climate change turned the states of the Great Plains into desert. The Midwest corn belt became arid grasslands suitable only for the growing of sorghum. Other countries lost valuable farmland as well. The loss of so much farmland that had been dedicated to the growing of corn sent the price of corn, which was the primary feed for beef cattle, soaring. Beef became too expensive for fast food. Chicken soared in price, as well. The only fast food chicken chain that survived was Chick-fil-A which came to be considered fine dining. Where you had once seen hamburger restaurants, you now saw little hole-in-the-wall taco joints which filled their tacos with beans and rice and used fish and meat solely as condiments. Department stores had almost entirely disappeared as well. They now existed solely in the gated areas occupied exclusively by the rich. Elsewhere, discount stores were all that existed. Cheapmart ruled the roost. Most shopping malls were abandoned. Kids had once liked to go exploring in abandoned shopping malls, but it became too dangerous because homeless drug addicts who had been kicked out of regular homeless encampments tended to drift toward the abandoned shopping malls. Even I was a bit afraid of the homeless drug addicts. If you disturbed them, sometimes they would burst out of nowhere and come at you will a filthy syringe. I've killed a few of them who tried to attack me. I considered them too dangerous to leave alive.

On the world scene, untreatable forms of malaria had broken loose in pockets along the Amazon river basin, the Congo river basin, and the Mekong river basin. It wasn't just people dying. It was every living animal, both warm-blooded and cold-blooded. These malaria-infested areas had become death zones with only plants and insects still alive, and they were getting bigger with each passing year.

I shifted a bit on the window ledge of the abandoned hotel. I wanted to jump off and float down to the street, but that was too dangerous in this day and age of drones flying overhead just about everywhere in America. I avoided all open spaces easily visible from the sky. I had learned to think like an animal that always had one eye focused on the sky looking out for hawks. The drones no longer carried just cameras. Some of them were armed. The "War on Terror" was now in its thirty-first year with no end in sight. The drones were also being used in the "War on Drugs." There had been several incidents in which drones fired on automobiles being chased by the police because they were suspected of carrying large amounts of illegal drugs. Did I mention that there had been two cases in which a drone fired on a young woman simply because she looked like me and was dressed like me? Short, freckle-faced redheads had learned never to wear dark blue, knee-length cotton dresses for fear of being mistaken for me. The Department of Homeland Security's target recognition software that scanned all images from Trapwire cameras wasn't as accurate as they had been claiming.

I leaned back into the abandoned hotel room and opened a portal to another abandoned hotel two streets away. I had been there before. I found a window and peered out. Sure enough, off in the distance I saw a glint off some small object flying in the sky. The Defense Department had spent fortunes trying to make the drones blend into the sky, but they could still be seen. I decided it was time to leave.

I returned to Wonderland and had my lunch with Bill McGill's crew of brewers. I work afternoons at the brewery making my own recipe of walnut brandy and "period" brandy. It's only a few hours and the time seems to go quickly. It's certainly not like working at a regular job in the world above. Bill never breathes down my neck, and no one worries about productivity. We don't produce for profit, and there are no books to keep. We produce for our fellow residents of Wonderland, and trade the surplus in the world above for a few items that we can't produce. "Old Bill's Brandy" is a favorite black-market item among the rich in the world above.

After my shift, I was free for the evening, and returned to my drifting in the ruins of Detroit. Just outside of Detroit's border, I saw a new completed prison. Just what the country needed. More jailbirds. Most of the country's prisoners were drug users and shoplifters. Non-violent offenders. Other countries - civilized countries - might have dealt with drug abuse and shoplifting with referral to social service agencies. The proud, self-righteous U.S.A. just locked them up. There were several states with "Three Strikes Laws" that would put a person in prison for life for three shoplifting offenses. In 2032, the United States had about 21 million people in jail. We had more people in prison at one moment than the entire number of people who had passed through Stalin's Gulag during the entire time of its existence. The Republicans saw nothing wrong with this, although they did occasionally grumble about the cost of the contracts with the private prison corporations that housed most of America's unfortunate jailbirds. Some Baptist ministers in the South occasionally wondered aloud how many of America's governing officials held stock in the private prison corporations. "Are some politicians promoting tough-on-crime legislation because more prisoners equals more profits and more dividends in their own pockets?" Prisons were like wars: the country never seemed to run out of money for them.

I had been leading homeless people in middle-of-the-night grocery store ransackings for basic necessities for around twenty-five years. It was intended as a form of political protest against government indifference to inequality. Not one piece of legislation, not one reform, not even a raise in the minimum wage had been passed in response. In 2024, when Republican voter restrictions finally achieved their aim of pushing the Democrats down into the status of a third party, the Republicans and Libertarians joined to eliminate the minimum wage. It was their idea of a jobs program. It didn't work out the way the economists said it would. The lack of purchasing power on the part of so many people who had jobs helped to push the economy down even further. Businesses need customers. It was that simple. It became obvious that above-market minimum wages were, if anything, providing a small boost to the economy. That's when the prison population and number of homeless people really exploded. That's also when I started to appreciate the foresight of the National Rifle Association that had rabidly resisted any restrictions on gun ownership.

Every large homeless encampment in the country had at least 100 hunting rifles, and a fair number of nasty semi-automatic pistols. There were usually a few old machine guns floating around, as well. I even saw an old Soviet AK-47. The police were afraid to enter homeless encampments because the residents were so heavily armed. There had been several well-publicized shootouts between homeless encampments and police squads attempting to evict them. Thus homeless encampments in 2032 were, for the most part, left alone by police departments. Elected officials had finally decided that the trouble of evicting homeless people from vacant, unused public property such as riversides, and from abandoned industrial zones was not worth the trouble. Meanwhile, deep-down-inside, I had started to question the point of peaceful protest because it had produced nothing positive for twenty-five years. All those guns floating around in the homeless encampments were starting to give me ideas. Terrifying, possibly immoral ideas. I wasn't so sure about right and wrong anymore. Black and white, good and evil, justice, the rule of law, equality of opportunity, citizenship. It had all started to melt in my mind into a terrifying glaze of gray and bright, red blood. Could revolution be justified when the result was likely to be a mass slaughter of innocents?

I went home to sleep for awhile before I started on the night's planned raids.

End of Chapter 1

This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2: "The Raid"

I didn't do as many raids per week as I had done right after kidnapping the U.S. Senate. As the years went by, the number I did per week steadily dwindled. Now I was doing only around five a week. One a day for five days, sometimes. Five raids in one night, sometimes, so I could have the rest of the week off. I'm not sure if it was demoralization at the lack of results or just me getting older. Maybe I was just getting tired.

The raid tonight was for a homeless encampment on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Nevada had the biggest homeless encampments in the country. There were some places in Nevada where one out of every two people was homeless. The state was a disaster area. Boarded-up foreclosed homes everywhere. The irony of half the homes in the state standing empty and half the people in the state being homeless was lost on the state politicians who continued to wrangle over the age-old questions of taxes, abortion, and gays getting married. Well, it was Nevada, after all. Las Vegas wasn't known as "Sin City" for nothing.

I had been to this encampment several times before. The leader of the encampment greeted me when I walked out of my smoke portal. I liked to arrive via a smoke portal because it gave a greater entrance effect. Sort of like Jeannie from the old TV series out of her bottle. Around the perimeter of the camp, men with hunting rifles walked back and forth. The night patrol keeping an eye out for cops and the occasional criminal gang that preyed on homeless people. Homeless, attractive young women were prized targets for the sexual slave trade gangs.

The leader of the encampment had a magazine rolled up in his hand. He and I knew each other well. "A recent copy of People magazine," he said. "Did you know that you're in here?"

"No, I didn't. I'm surprised that People magazine still exists. The last time I saw one, it was only 32 pages. Almost no advertisements."

"Still only 32 pages. The affluent leave them behind on restaurant tables for the employees. We've got a few young women in this encampment who wait tables at the restaurants down the road. Don't worry. They carry pistols with them when they leave the camp. I still can't believe you can carry a Glock in this state and not need a permit of any kind."

"The girls need pistols just to walk down the road?" Even a cynic like me didn't realize this area was that dangerous.

"About once a week one of them kills a guy for attempting rape. The rape attempts almost always happen after dark. The girls just leave the rapists' bodies on the side of the road. Our girls carry a small pistol strapped to their thighs. The cops only investigate the murders of people who live in the gated communities. They don't give two shits about the rest of us."

"The wild, wild west. It's the nineteenth century all over again. Only this time the Indians are already on reservations. Where do I appear in the magazine?"

"You're in their top ten most beautiful women in America list again."

"They only put me in there to piss off the government. Since it's illegal to say anything positive about me under the 'Promoting Terrorism Act,' they put me in their beauty list to thumb their noses at the government. They also need at least one woman in there who has real boobs." I couldn't help grinning. I threw my chest out and pointed at it. "These are one hundred percent real! Straight from the Valrhona chocolate factory in France! I didn't get D-cups by starving myself!"

My companion blushed a bit. Maybe I shouldn't have thrown my big tits in his face. But I was proud of them, ya know? I had been flat-chested when I was skinny. "You're actually number two on the list this year," he said.

"What? Usually I'm the token fat chick in the list." I didn't really think of myself as fat. I still had an easily visible waist, after all.

"You're not fat, Alice. You're probably in there because you look like Judy Garland. There's a lot of old guys in this country who have a soft spot for the 1939 MGM musical. Put you in a gingham dress, and you could pass for an adult Dorothy. I still can't get over how you haven't seemed to age over the past two decades."

"There's something in the water in Wonderland that slows down the aging process dramatically after you've been drinking it for about 30 years. I arrived in Wonderland in 1977 and hit that 30-year threshold in around 2007. I've been the equivalent of about 47 ever since." I thought it best not to tell him that Arianne and I would probably live to 500 as long as we continued to live in Wonderland.

"You look like you're in your early 30s."

"A little extra flesh in the face can take nearly two decades off." I reached up and pinched my cheeks to make the point. My conversation companion rolled his eyes and looked a bit embarrassed. I wasn't embarrassed at all.

I opened the magazine and looked at the women in the top ten list. Number one was a short, blond-haired, buxom country music star who was as chubby as me. With a heart-shaped face, round, prominent breasts, and big hips, she was spectacular. I couldn't believe it. The rest of the women in the list were also chubby with their rounded hips and heavy thighs. All ten of the women in the list were in the size twelve to sixteen range. The one rather tall woman in the list might have even been an eighteen. I was speechless.

"Who put this list together? Where's the usual parade of underfed Hollywood starlets with fake boobs?"

"There's an interesting article in the magazine about the relationship of the feminine ideal to economic conditions. Some scientist discovered that during hard economic times, men develop a preference for full-figured women. The theory is that they're seeking comfort and cuddling. The worse the economy, the bigger the babes."

"I'm a babe? At five feet tall and size sixteen I'm suddenly a hot chick? So it's another Great Depression. Good grief! Look at these women! Round faces and big, real breasts. They've all got hips and butts. I never thought I'd live to see the day that women with bodies like this would be considered attractive."

"There's another theory, too. Men like what's scarce. Right now, most poor people are skinny stick figures. The disappearance of fast food restaurants selling cheap, fatty meat has coincided with shrinking waistlines throughout the country. You can now tell the social class of someone in the U.S. just by looking at his waistline. America is no longer the land of the world's fattest poor people. Our poor people are now like poor people everywhere else - skinny. Only the affluent can afford to be chubby."

It suddenly dawned on me that I looked like someone from the well-fed upper middle class. I looked like a pampered housewife.

"I came to carry out a raid. You want to go round up the raiders?" I sat down at a battered wooden picnic table. It dawned on me that most homeless encampments would benefit by having more picnic tables around so that people could sit at tables to eat instead of sit on the ground. I made a mental note to steal a few picnic tables on this raid. The encampment leader came back with this night's raiders. Mostly muscular middle-aged men. Not a spare ounce of fat on any of them. I almost felt guilty for having a body well-fed enough to jiggle. I passed out gloves and ski masks as usual. I put gloves on my hands, but left my own face uncovered. Standard practice for me.

I prepped the target hypermarket by throwing the shrunken head of the duchess through a portal the same as I had been doing for twenty-five years. The gas had always successfully cleared out any employees and guards in the stores at night. The government had never found a gas mask that could filter out the noxious fumes from the shrunken head. My usual tactic had always worked - until this time.

I waited two minutes for the fumes to clear and then opened another portal. I stepped through, suspecting nothing. The sensation of a giant lead wall being slammed into my chest knocked me backwards onto the floor. I sensed the world going black, and, for a moment, saw myself standing in line at the gates of purgatory. The blackness returned only to fade into a dazzling, blinding white.

End of Chapter 2

This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.

Sometimes I wonder if the "hysteria wave" in Madness Returns came from my own fan fiction. Unless American McGee himself speaks up, I'll never know for sure. For the record, American McGee is welcome to use anything he likes from my fan fiction. No credit needed. I'd love to see a chocolate bar used as a powerup!


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3: "The Reawakening"

I awoke in a strange hospital room that I had never seen before. Spanish-language posters hung on a wall with peeling paint. A fan circled lazily overhead. The windows to the room were all open, and a slight breeze ruffled the curtains. Cheshire jumped up onto my bed.

"You'll be happy to know, Alice, that your portal suddenly closed before any of your raiders were able to step through. You're the only one who got shot."

"How would you know that?" I was still dizzy. The room spun in circles as I tried to lift my head to see Cheshire.

"Someone got hold of the store's closed-circuit security video and uploaded it to just about every video site on the internet. YouTube kept trying to delete it, but gave up. Anonymous attacked YouTube and uploaded tens of thousands of copies via tens of thousands of new accounts. You put on quite a show."

"What happened?"

"You were ambushed by an anti-terror squad all wearing scuba-diving equipment. No gas masks. They used air tanks. The government must have been spending a fortune to equip anti-terror squads with air tanks that have to be refilled every ninety minutes. Imagine all the years they must have been having these squads sitting in hypermarkets every night just waiting on the extremely remote chance that you would show up precisely when they were there. The law of averages finally caught up with you. The shrinkage in the number of hypermarkets certainly helped."

"The last thing I saw was blinding white. How many bodies did I leave behind?"

"All of the anti-terror squad. You killed them all. You didn't turn into the Queen of Hearts. You turned into this black-skinned demon-looking thing with threadlike snakes for hairs. This was something I'd never seen. Caterpillar said you turned into Medusa. He said it's what you became when you were exposed to a whole shelf of rage potion in that accident in your weapons locker. The anti-terror squad hit you with 104 bullets. The first six went completely through your chest before the rage potion that your body produced made you nearly impervious to the rest. If just one of those first six bullets had hit you in the head, we wouldn't be talking right now. The anti-terror squad didn't really have time to aim as they didn't know where you would open the portal. When they stopped firing, you looked like a life-sized rag doll that a child had carelessly tossed onto the floor. You didn't look like a person at all. Then, in the blink of an eye, you turned into Medusa and jumped up. You twirled like a ballerina chopping heads off with your Bowie Knife and sending them flying in all directions. Then you disappeared into a portal. Hatter says you showed up in his clinic draining blood all over the floor. He thought you were dead for sure. He brought you to the emergency room of this hospital. He had made a deal long ago for emergency medical care for any cases that he couldn't handle in his clinic. You're in a hospital in Havana, Cuba."

I leaned my head back onto my pillow, and heaved a sigh of relief. The ceiling still spun in my face. Cuba was one of the few countries of the world that was actually safe for me to walk around in out in the open. There were no U.S. drones flying overhead. The Cuban air force had been shooting down every U.S. drone they spotted. Armed or carrying only cameras, it didn't matter. The U.S. had given up trying to fly drones over Cuba years ago. There were no CIA assassins roaming the streets, either. The Cuban security services were the best in the world, and had an uncanny knack for picking CIA agents out of the embassy employees or a pack of tourists roaming the UNESCO sites.

"I've got some news that you're not going to like. Better to hear it now than find out in a few moments." Cheshire heaved a deep sigh. "You've been in a coma for nearly five months. Those tubes in your arms are both intravenous feeding drips. Most coma patients do okay with those drips, but you had a continuous high fever most of the time you were out. You've lost a lot of muscle tissue and nearly all of your muscle tone. You're going to have to go through a rehabilitation program. Just walking right now would probably exhaust you." Cheshire seemed to grit his teeth. "You've lost about seventy pounds while you were out. You woke up just in time. The doctors here were about one week from telling everyone in Wonderland to come and say their goodbyes."

I did the math. I had gone into a homeless encampment to do a raid weighing 165 pounds and woke up in a hospital weighing 95 pounds. I'm sure I groaned. I looked to the left and right to make sure the tubes from the IVs were long enough to allow me to move my arms. I touched my fingers to my face. No cute chubby cheeks. My face was bony. My cheeks were hollowed out. I wondered how ghastly I looked. I decided that I shoud be grateful for being alive instead of vainly worrying about my face. I lifted a little bit the thin blanket covering me and put my right hand under it. I was still looking at the ceiling. I ran my fingers over my chest. The prominent, rounded D-cup breasts that I so dearly loved to show off had deflated like a pair of punctured balloons. There was nothing left of them but some loose skin. I let loose with a string of four-letter words. I could feel my ribs. I hadn't felt my ribs in more than two and a half decades. My stomach had caved inwards below my ribs. It felt as if someone had scooped out my entire stomach. The roll of fat below my waist was gone. No squishy shelf just below the belly button. No rounded bulge just above my crotch. My hips felt like bone sticking out. My ass was killing me. I had so little flesh on my backside that even the soft hospital bed hurt. I had felt beautiful when I was a smooth-skinned, plump size 16. I had gloried in all the soft, rounded curves that I had. My dresses, still with high necklines, were form-fitting and designed to show off my chest, hips, and backside. The roll below my waist, also outlined in my dresses, hadn't bothered me at all. I sure didn't feel beautiful after touching all those bones sticking out.

"I'll bet you're thirsty, Alice. I'm going to press the button to summon a nurse. They need to know that you're awake. This room will be full of doctors in a moment."

A short, brown-skinned nurse peeked in the door, waved to me, and immediately left. She returned a few minutes later carrying a tray with some scrambled eggs, toast, and a glass of some tropical fruit juice. She pulled the IV needles out and swabbed the insertion points. She warned me in slow, carefully enunciated English, "Eat slowly." She left again. Apparently the doctors decided to give me some time to eat before filling my room.

End of Chapter 3

This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4: "The Recovery"

A few minutes after I finished eating, one English-speaking doctor came in to inform me of what was going to happen next.

"We're going to move you to the rehabilitation wing to regain your muscle tone and strength. It's a medical facility, so don't expect it to be like a gym in the United States. There are swimming pools. Don't worry - they're chlorinated just like pools in the United States. The water in the pools also contains a chemical which turns urine blue, so if any jerks pee in the pool, you'll know it. There are mountain climbing and tree climbing simulations to develop upper arm strength. Your upper arms are less than half the size they were when you came in. You've lost a lot of muscle. The same for your thighs. You need to take regular walks around Havana to regain your leg strength. You won't need to walk alone. Your friend Arianne will be here to walk with you. We also want to bring you up to 55 kilos before we release you. We want you to look presentable when we release you. We're not like hospitals in America where the insurance companies have you tossed out on your ass the instant you can stand up and breathe. It would reflect badly on Cuban medicine if we turned you out looking like Tim Burton's Corpse Bride."

I couldn't help giggling at the doctor's last crack. "You think I look like Tim Burton's Corpse Bride right now?"

"My dear, you look like walking death. We'll have a schedule for you which has various exercises you need to do each day, time for you to take walks in Havana, and six meals a day."

"Six meals a day?"

"You can't eat much at a sitting after all that time hooked up to intravenous drips. You're not used to solid food. We don't want to make you sick. You'll be eating six small meals a day. Relax, it's not as terrible as eating American hospital food. Cuban hospital kitchens use spices in the food. It's not as bland and flavorless as you might expect. I hope you like rice and beans, though. Ever since that British Petroleum oil spill poisoned the entire gulf, fish is extremely scarce and expensive in Cuba. Our fishing fleets go all the way out into the Atlantic to fish now. Most of it ends up in the tourist hotels. There are a lot of pork dishes on the hospital menus, but your friends have told me that you don't eat meat."

"I can take walks out in Havana?"

"You can go anywhere you like. No one will follow you. Cuba has changed a bit since the Castro years. This is still a socialist state, but the country is not as tightly regimented as it used to be. The Communist Party still has the final say on everything, but we have a parliament of 500 randomly selected citizens. The selection of our parliament is far more democratic than what you have in the United States. Even our Communist Party has more diversity than your corporate-controlled government. Rich lawyers do not run this country. Our prisons are nearly empty. We simply let our malcontents leave."

"Do you have any news magazines from the last five months available? Magazines in English, preferably. I can read Spanish to a limited degree, but probably not enough for a news magazine."

"I can tell you the highlights of what's been happening the last five months. First, the U.S. government thinks you're dead and has been crowing about your death the same way they celebrated the death of Bin Laden. People in the rich, gated communities turned out in big flag-waving ceremonies that appalled all of the rest of the world. No one outside of the United States thinks you're a terrorist. The poor communities rioted. I don't think the riots were about you. It was the idea that someone could get shot 104 times for stealing food that incensed the poor."

The doctor paused a moment to sip from a glass of water. He motioned to a nurse to approach and said something in Spanish too rapid for me to understand. The nurse left and the doctor continued.

"People in the homeless encampments of Los Angeles took over the entire city for two months. They declared it 'The People's Republic of Los Angeles' and took all the empty, foreclosed houses from the banks and gave them to homeless families. They declared all vacant lots to be public property and passed out seeds for people to start gardens. The governor of California ordered the California National Guard to invade the city and arrest all the members of the 'illegal government.' The commander of the California National Guard knew how heavily armed people in homeless encampments are and refused. He said invading Los Angeles would be a bloodbath. The California governor had him arrested and thrown in prison. The Los Angeles rebellion ended when the federal government launched drone strikes inside Los Angeles and had the Marine Corps invade the city. It was a bloodbath. The U.S. government kept the foreign and domestic press out, but they couldn't stop the flood of cellphone videos, photos, and bloggers' eyewitness accounts. All of the captured rebels were thrown up against a wall and shot. It was the Paris Commune of 1871 all over again."

"The first whiff of rebellion in the U.S., and I missed it," I said. At that moment, I felt cheated, and I still do.

"There were more rebellions than that," continued the doctor. "Homeless encampments carried out their own raids of hypermarkets for foods. Most food banks were either too far away or had too little to be of much use to the homeless encampments. It was steal or starve. They took weapons with them and sometimes blasted the doors open with machine gun fire and antique hand grenades left over from World War II and the Korean War. They filled shopping carts and took everything back to their encampments. The federal government used Marine Corps soldiers to arrest entire homeless encampments that had carried out raids. Some homeless encampments resisted. They sent their children fleeing right through the Marine Corps lines and fought to the last bullet. Mostly hunting rifles up against soldiers with automatic machine guns, grenades, and rocket-propelled grenades. It was suicide. The raids that you had been leading left almost no evidence behind because you always robbed hypermarkets that were several states away from the homeless encampment that you led. With the rubber gloves and ski masks, there was nobody left to blame but you. There were also jurisdiction problems. Very clever of you."

The nurse who had left a moment ago returned and handed me a stack of about twenty old copies of the International Herald Tribune. The doctor thanked her and told me that all the tourist hotels in the area sold the International Herald Tribune. "Tourists often leave their newspapers behind in the outdoor cafes. Nurses on their lunch breaks often scavenge the newspapers that the tourists leave behind after eating. You can keep those." I looked at the masthead. "A Joint Publication of the New York Times, the Manchester Guardian, and Le Monde." So the newspaper wasn't all American sources. Maybe I would find out a bit more than most Americans knew. I put the stack of newspapers in the small closet on top of my travel bag.

"We'll leave you in this room for one more day and you can tell your friends when they arrive that you're being moved over to the rehabilitation wing. Hatter and Arianne usually come in the evening at about six o'clock. Cheshire goes home then. Hatter and Arianne usually leave at about seven o'clock. You're then alone until the next morning. Cheshire shows up at around six o'clock every morning. He stays with you most of the day, only going out to eat. He found a tidal pool which has plenty of fish swimming around, and he's been feasting on fish. Did you notice that his fur has grown back in? He was pretty skeletal-looking when we first saw him." Cheshire hopped up on my bed.

"Did you all forget that I was here?" Cheshire paraded back and forth on the foot of my bed. "So what do you think, Alice? Do I look better with fur?"

I didn't notice because I had had my head back on my pillow, staring at the spinning ceiling. Cheshire had a full coat of fur and looked like a normal lynx. "You're a very handsome cat!" I said.

Cheshire sat down on his haunches and curled his tail around in front of himself. "I'm having trouble believing it myself. I'm so used to being an ugly, old bag of bones. The snarks in Wonderland just aren't enough."

I made a mental note of it to teach Cheshire how to cook eggs when we got back to Wonderland. I'd seen eggs in cans of cat food before and knew that eggs were a reasonable form of protein for Cheshire. I looked up at the clock on the wall and saw that it was around six o'clock. Time for Hatter and Arianne to show up and for Cheshire to go home.

Cheshire's ears perked up. "You have guests." Hatter and Arianne walked in and were instantly startled to see me awake. Hatter opened a portal for Cheshire and he sauntered through with that Puss-In-Boots swagger of his.

"Well, well! The sleeper has awakened!" announced Hatter. "You had us all worried! There are some clean clothes and lingerie in your travel bag in the closet. A nurse was giving you a quick sponge bath every morning. You're clean. There are some socks and shoes in the closet, as well. Why don't you get dressed and we'll go out into Havana to look around a bit. There's a small outdoor café near the hospital that has fish tacos. Arianne and I haven't had dinner. How about you?"

"I just had something to eat. Thanks." The doctor looked at Arianne and Hatter and obviously had something to say.

"We're going to move Alice to the rehabilitation wing tomorrow. She's too thin and weak to be turned loose now. We'd like to bring her back up to 55 kilos before we release her. We want her to look presentable before we toss her out." Hatter looked at me while the doctor walked out the door. Arianne shut the door.

"There are no bills to worry about, Alice. I made a deal with the Cubans for emergency medical care ages ago. This isn't America."

"If this were America, a CIA assassination squad would have gotten me." I got up out of bed to get dressed. I got a surprise when I saw the dress that Arianne had packed for me. It was a child's floral gingham dress.

"I had to get a child's dress to find something small enough to fit. You're tiny now."

I stripped off my hospital gown and lingerie in front of Hatter and Arianne. Hatter winced and looked embarrassed.

"Oh, come on now, Hatter! You've seen me naked in physical exams before. No need to turn away." I saw Arianne wince, too.

"Not a pretty sight, am I? I need a bikini for tomorrow because part of my rehabilitation involves swimming. I need my muscles back." I held up my twig-like right arm. I still had the strength of The Queen of Hearts - and Medusa! - but I looked like a weakling. I didn't like looking like a weakling.

"Alice, nobody wants to see a skeleton in a bikini." Arianne looked uncomfortable.

"I'll be in a medical rehabilitation center. Nobody expects me to be a pretty sight."

"I'll get you one," promised Hatter.

"Not alone, you won't," said Arianne. "I'll go along with you to make sure you don't pick out something hideous.

"I'll bring Lindsay along and we'll make it a night out," answered Hatter.

"Three's a crowd, Hatter," said Arianne. "I trust Lindsay's judgment. Let her pick out a bikini. Make sure that Lindsay knows Alice's current size." Lindsay was Hatter's third wife. The first bailed on him, and the notorious Sarah Palin got eaten by a killer mushroom. Nobody had expected Lindsay to last so long. Bill McGill had found the perfect job for Lindsay at the brewery: quality control. Lindsay was the taste tester. She was also one of the brewers.

Hatter pulled a syringe out of a small bag. "I've been injecting you with a concentrate of water from Wonderland. I was worried about the effect of no exposure to Wonderland's water for the duration of your stay in this hospital. This issue has never come up before. Roll up your sleeve. This is the last one. I'll bring you a bottle of water from Wonderland tomorrow."

I rolled up my sleeve and let Hatter inject me with the concentrate. He was good with a needle. I hardly felt it. "You were worried that I'd shrivel up like that woman at the end of the novel 'Lost Horizon,' weren't you?"

"I was worried because I don't know what the effect would be," said Hatter. I was glad that he had thought of the water issue. It made me feel that Hatter had been looking after me the entire time that I was out.

"It looks like I shriveled up, anyway," I said. I wasn't happy at all about what had happened to my face. I was so used to looking like Judy Garland. Without the chubby, full cheeks, I looked completely different. I felt ugly.

All three of us left the hospital with Hatter leading the way to the small outdoor café. We sat down. I was relieved to note that Hatter and Arianne both looked exactly as I had remembered. Hatter was the same old dandy in fine clothes, face as ugly as ever. Arianne was the same plump, buxom size 16 that I had been. Looking at her, I was intensely aware of what I had lost. I was more than a little jealous. Hatter and Arianne ordered two fish tacos for themselves. I had just had a small dinner, but it dawned on me that I was kind of starving. "You've got money to pay, Hatter?" I asked. Hatter said that he had enough Cuban currency for a small shopping expedition. I didn't ask where he got the money. "If you're paying, then I'm going to eat. You all know that I'm going to be eating hospital food six times a day, right?"

Arianne nodded in the affirmative. I ordered six tacos and Hatter gasped. "You'll never finish them! Didn't the hospital warn you not to eat too much at one sitting?"

"I'm not going to get the opportunity to eat here every day, am I? I think I should take advantage of the occasion."

Hatter bet Arianne two flasks of period brandy that I wouldn't finish the tacos. Arianne took the bet. "Of course she'll finish them. She has a stomach made out of rubber. You think she got up to 165 pounds by eating like a bird?" Hatter reminded Arianne that she had weighed 173 pounds at her last physical exam.

"Perhaps, Arianne, you have a stomach made out of rubber, too?" Hatter said, smirking just a little bit. Arianne scowled. Unlike me, Arianne was touchy about her weight. I gave Hatter a silent look that he knew meant "Back off!" Hatter gave me a sweet smile and shut up.

I took my time eating the tacos. I had to get up and walk around a bit every 15 minutes because my bony ass hurt so much. I literally had nothing to sit on and the chairs were wrought iron. Hatter and Arianne finished their two tacos in about fifteen minutes. I wanted to savor the occasion of an outdoor café near the ocean in an area that vaguely reminded me of the older sections of Paris. The locale was lovely, the breeze kept the flies away, and the birds that fluttered about the empty tables were only a minor annoyance. The salt smell of ocean spray was a lovely accompaniment to the spicy, grilled fish tacos. I did finish the six tacos in about an hour. I felt fine. Stuffed, but fine.

Arianne looked at me. "You eat like that every day, and you'll be back up to 165 pounds in two months.

"Good!" I said. "I fucking hate being flat-chested!" And bony-faced. For the record, I didn't puke.

End of Chapter 4

This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5: "The Rehabilitation"

The next day when Hatter and Arianne were preparing to leave, I led them both over to the tidal pool Cheshire had been fishing in to explain that I wanted Hatter to test a few of the fish in his lab to see if they were safe to eat. I was worried that my dear feline friend had been eating poison. Lacking anything to catch the fish with, or a water bucket to keep them in, Hatter took Arianne home first, and then popped back with a small net and a bucket. It took awhile of splashing along the edges of the pool, but we eventually caught three small fish of different species, and Hatter popped back to his lab to test them. At the beginning of his visit the next day, Hatter informed me that the fish were safe to eat at least in the short run. No contamination showed up in his tests on the three fish. Hatter also told me that he himself would not eat anything from the Gulf of Mexico for fear of as-yet unknown long-term consequences.

My daily routine at the hospital was a taste of mind-crushing boredom and tongue-destroying tastelessness. The doctor had promised me that the hospital cafeteria used spices, and it was true. They used them in such small quantities that I had trouble believing that I was in Latin America. Everything the hospital cafeteria served was low-fat, low cholesterol, low-sodium, and healthy. I started to think that nutritionists were like lawyers: the best thing to do with them was line them up and shoot them. The doctors wanted me to gain 25 pounds on this stuff? It was diet food. I wondered if it was fifty-year-old packaged dinners from Jenny Craig. Even memories of Swilly's seemed enticing.

Cheshire continued to show up at six o'clock every morning to keep me company during my daily routines. His wry wisecracks made my exercises bearable, and the looks on people's faces when he accompanied me for my walks in Havana were priceless. One tourist asked me if it was safe to pet Cheshire. "Better not," I said. "Look at those teeth." Cheshire flashed the tourist his widest grin exposing a mouthful of shark-like teeth. The tourist turned white as a Paris hotel sheet and ran. Cheshire continued to return home when Hatter and Arianne arrived at around six in the evening.

The routine was wall climbing and simulated tree climbing in the morning, a two-hour break for walking in Havana, swimming in the afternoon, another two-hour break for walking in Havana, and an hour of track running in the evening. The wall climbing was the most fun. It took some time to get the safety harness on, but once that was dealt with, I was a regular little monkey from the start. The doctors wondered where I got the strength to pull myself upwards with such twig-like upper arms. I kept quiet about having the strength of the Queen of Hearts even while not converted. Let them marvel at me I thought. About every two and a half hours, I had a small meal scheduled. Cheshire started to accompany me for meals just to get some water. He said he had been drinking from fountains in the hospital which grossed out a few people. People complained that his whiskers had touched the spout. He'd flip the switch on and then lean back and let the stream of water splash into his mouth. It sounded inconvenient for a cat. Breakfast was the only good meal of the day at the hospital. Every breakfast included one scrambled, low-cholesterol egg. It tasted like the real thing. Sometimes Cheshire would eat a scrambled egg with me. People really stared when they saw Cheshire sitting in a chair like a human.

The high point of every day was the evening visit from Hatter and Arianne. The second time they came, I wanted to go back to that outdoor café that served fish tacos. Hatter and Arianne looked at each other.

"Alice, I'm not sure if eating fish more than occasionally here would be a good idea," said Arianne. "You have no idea where that fish came from. We could have been eating pure poison from the Gulf of Mexico yesterday."

"The doctor in the hospital told me that the Cuban fishing fleet goes all the way out into the Atlantic to fish. You do know that the entire fishing industry here is state-owned, don't you?"

"No, I didn't know that it was all state-owned," said Arianne. "So the fish is safe to eat?"

I assured Arianne and Hatter that the fish was safe to eat here. I also informed them that it was so expensive that most of it ended up sold to tourists. Outside of the tourist zones, we were unlikely to find any fish for sale. The doctor didn't mention it, but I suspected that most of Cuba's fish ended up in restaurants catering to tourists. The prices in the outdoor café serving fish tacos weren't bad by U.S. standards, but I knew that the café would be unaffordable to ordinary Cubans. Another attraction of that café was the frequency with which other patrons would leave newspapers, usually copies of the Internation Herald Tribune purchased from hotel lobbies, lying on the tables. After I convinced Hatter and Arianne that the fish was safe to eat, we started going there daily in the evenings. I always ordered six fish tacos and unsweetened iced tea. Every evening, I had a couple of new newspapers to read and catch up on what had been happening.

The news from the United States was profoundly depressing. Every day it seemed, several homeless encampments carried out grocery store raids. The most common result was the entire camp being arrested by Marine Corps soldiers a few days later. In the time that I had been gone, the homeless population of the United States had gone down by about one million people - because they had been herded off to jail. The children of arrested homeless parents were being given away like candy to upper middle-class families. It didn't take long for the luxury of typical upper-middle-class homes to seduce the snatched children. Money couldn't buy love, but luxury sure could. I started to realize that my grocery store raids weren't as pointless as I had originally thought they were. Urban homeless encampments began to rely almost exclusively on dumpster diving for food. With no federal inspection of foods in the grocery stores, dumpster diving was not nearly as productive as it had been twenty-five years ago. Grocery stores in 2032 only threw out what was obviously tainted or otherwise undesirable. You needed a cast-iron stomach to eat food from a dumpster in 2032. I started to squirm with a desire to do something. I couldn't wait to get out of the hospital.

Every week, the doctors gave me a brief examination which involved weighing me, pinching my upper arms and thighs, and giving me a stress test on a treadmill to test my endurance. It took me only two months to hit their target of 55 kilos. They couldn't figure out how I did it on that tasteless hospital food. I never told them about my evening soujourns in a certain outdoor café near the hospital. My body was solid and muscular from head to foot. All those exercises had achieved their purpose. I was also as curveless as a teen-aged boy. Considering what I had in mind, I thought that my curveless body was a blessing in disguise.

End of Chapter 5

This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6: "One Toke Over the Line"

I was swamped with attention from Gnome Village. My seamstress measured me for new dresses because I only had one size eight in my closet. She stared at me open-mouthed in amazement. "I hardly recognize you! So skinny! So fit!" Other gnome women plied me with baked goods to take home with me - fattening cakes and pastries, I noticed. They must have felt sorry for me, I guess. I gave the pastries away in Arianne's old homeless encampment. I didn't intend to eat them, and I didn't want them lying around tempting Arianne. Hatter invited Arianne and me to his outdoor dining tables for dinner. Sauteed mushrooms and rice, one of my favorite dinners. Arianne waited until late at night, after our showers, to give me her greeting.

Pulling me into her room and locking the door behind her, Arianne tossed off her dress with the flair of a stripper. I didn't have to guess what Arianne had in mind. She put a CD of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts in the player on her dresser with a raucous volume to cover up the sounds so that the other inhabitants of the house in Pandemonium wouldn't hear everything. Arianne had a full-length mirror in her bedroom right on the wall beside her bed which made sex in her room more interesting than in my room. I only had a small face mirror on the wall in my room above the chest of drawers She motioned for me to strip and took off the rest of her clothes except her socks. Wow! There was no other word I could think of to describe Arianne standing naked in front of me. I was instantly struck dizzy by the sensuality of her well-fleshed buxom figure. It had been seven months since Arianne and I had ripped into each other.

"You gain about ten pounds?" I asked Arianne. "You look fabulous, but you know that you're now bigger than I ever was."

"Yeah, about ten pounds," answered Arianne. "I gained all of it worrying about you."

"Don't worry about it. You look better than ever." I wasn't entirely lying: she did look quite seductive even with all those bulges and soft squishy spots. I crawled on top of her and indulged myself of her soft, voluptuous body. Lying on top her reminded me of sinking into Hatter's water bed. We wore each other out and awoke to the annoying beeps of an alarm clock.

"Time for Hatter's Party in the Weed Patch," said Arianne. "Come on, Sleepyhead! He hand rolled a couple of hundred just for your return!"

"I think we should both shower first before we leave. I don't want to show up for a toke party reeking of sex." Arianne nodded in agreement and we headed for the showers. Yes, we showered together. Gave me another chance to ogle Arianne's naked body. I couldn't make up my mind whether or not to be envious of her voluptuous curves. Part of me thought that she was getting downright fat. I sure knew to keep quiet about that.

We both headed back to our rooms and dressed quickly. It was five minutes to midnight when headed out the door. I decided to open a portal directly to the Weed Patch to avoid being late.

"You two too lazy to walk?" teased Hatter. Lindsay, Hatter's wife, looked Arianne over in a manner that made me wonder if she was entirely straight. She was holding a tumbler of brandy and ice and was obviously a little tipsy. I felt no need to worry as I knew what Lindsay didn't: Arianne only had eyes for me and had never shown any interest in anyone else. "Go ahead and try, girl," I thought. I chuckled at the thought of Arianne shoving her away with one finger. I had seen her shove men away with one finger uptop. I did feel a little sorry for Hatter. Arianne and I sat down with the rest of the group.

Hatter and all of his household staff of gnomes were there. Cheshire was suavely smoking a catnip cigar and eyed me with a frisky look on his face. Mr. White was his usual dignified self in a suit and tie. He was checking his pocket watch. The Gnome Elder, known in his village simply as "Mayor," was there. He looked me over with a little bit of horror in his face. I could tell that he might not enjoy his birthday gift this year as much as last year. Like Arianne, he liked me well-fleshed.

"Is everybody ready?" asked Hatter.

"Let the hallucinating begin," shouted Cheshire, waving his catnip cigar around.

Hatter set up an old "ghettoblaster" that played cassettes rather than CDs and popped in a tape of Three Dog Night. Soon "Mama Told Me Not to Come" came blasting out in all its static-filled glory as Hatter passed out his hand rolled lung destroyers. Lindsay lit hers first and was swiftly puffing away. The rest of us lit up and the intoxicated wallowing soon began. Wonderland Weed was a lot stronger than the often cut-with-anything crap from the world uptop.

Hatter toppled backward in grinning bliss and was soon unconscious. Lindsay poked him to see if he was still sentient, and, seeing to her satisfaction that he wasn't, wobbled over to Arianne, plopped her head in Arianne's lap, and asked if Arianne wanted to trade some three-finger salutes. Arianne pushed Lindsay's head out of her lap and moved to my right. The Gnome Elder passed out next. Mr. White was still puffing strong and seemingly unaffected. Cheshire still had his catnip cigar and was rolling on his back. I was starting to see wild, kaleidoscopic colors. Dizzy. Oh, so dizzy.

Arianne suddenly got up, complained about the heat, and stripped off all of her clothes. Good thing the Gnome Elder had already passed out. The sight of Arianne naked would have probably given him a heart attack. Hatter had already seen Arianne naked in physical exams, so no treat for him. Given his distaste for extra flesh on women's bodies, I think he would have been quite turned off. Lindsay observed the spectacle with interest and possibly a bit of lust.

"Hey, Arianne! You look pretty good for a fat chick! Wanna fuck?" Lindsay got up and promptly toppled over. Out for the night. Have a nice trip, you drunken slut.

The gnomes on Hatter's staff were toppling over like dominoes. The Three Dog Night cassette had reached its end. Mr. White was still puffing away. Hatter started to squirm and obviously had an erection. I wondered who he was hallucinating about. Probably me. Cheshire had finished his catnip cigar and was now starting on his joint. He was leaning back against a stump and his head was obviously swimming. I was still sitting up when everything appeared to shrink.

Arianne's reclining naked body started to look like a mountain of pink flesh. Her belly button looked like a cave. I got up and started to climb up the squishy thick roll below her waist. My feet kept plunging in and it was hard to climb. The flesh around her belly button wobbled like jello. After a bit of struggle, I managed to pull myself in.

There were vines growing everywhere, and the surface of the cave, although still spongy, was a bit more stable. There were cobwebs everywhere and I started to wonder if anybody ever dusted in there. Sort of like the Munsters' house. Up ahead I saw some liberty cap mushrooms and picked up a few to eat. A few squirrels scampered past, and up ahead I saw a wooded area with neon lights flashing. I had to check that out. I stumbled my way up to the lights with the "floor" still wobbling underneath my feet.

The neon lights flashed "What Would Nixon Do?" Sitting in the middle in a king's throne was Richard M. Nixon. He flashed me a grin and raised both hands giving his trademarked victory salute.

"What wisdom would you have me impart?" asked Tricky Dick.

"Could you tell me what to do about the idiots running the United States these days?"

"Ah, yes. They sure aren't like the Republicans I remember. My Republicans had brains. Uh, well...most of them."

"They've restricted voting to the point that only about twelve percent of the adult population can now vote."

"Well, obviously you're not going to change anything by voting. The crowd running things now won't be satisfied until only billionaires can vote. You know. That 'job creators' thing. If you're not a job creator you're no one."

"They only create jobs in Asia where they can employ slave labor."

"Yes, I know. Not too smart of them. Unemployed people don't buy much. People paid starvation wages don't buy much either. Smart capitalists create their own customers." Nixon shrugged with a helpless-looking smile.

"So what can I do about the idiots?"

"I would recommend nothing. There is such a thing as futility."

"Well fat lot of good you are! Thanks for nothing!"

"Sorry kid, I tell it as it is. Remember me trying to clean up the U.S. environment? It was me who created the Environmental Protection Agency. Did it stop British Petroleum from destroying the Gulf of Mexico? When's the last time you ate shrimp?"

"I don't remember it's been so long. At least two decades. I've been afraid to eat shrimp since the B.P. oil spill because you usually don't know where the shrimp came from."

"See. Some things are just hopeless. Here. Have a joint. It'll make you feel better."

"Weren't you all hot on the War Against Drugs?"

"I was, but look at the world nowadays. Hallucinogenic drugs are the only thing that make life bearable now. Otherwise we'd all be jumping off of bridges. Except for the billionaires who own everything. You never knew that I hated those right-wing billionaires, did you? Knuckle-dragging neanderthals who thought that they had a God-given right to dump anything they pleased into rivers, lakes, and the environment in general. Bill Gates was what billionaires were supposed to be. Wanted to do good with his fortune after he made it. Wanted to eliminate malaria from the globe. Windows sucked, but Bill was okay. Steve Jobs was a fucking prick. Selfish bastard. Do people now have to pay tolls to jump off a bridge? Where did the world I knew go?"

I stopped talking. I sat down with Richard M. Nixon and we smoked a bucketload of joints together. He seemed quite somber - heartbroken at what the world had become. And then he serenaded me with "Sister Goldenhair." I was surprised at how soulful his voice was.

I woke up in Arianne's bed and she wasn't there. None of the other residents of the house in Pandemonium had seen her either. About ten minutes later we all heard a loud scream which rattled the windows.

"Guess I better go fetch her," I said to Mr. White. She must still be in the Weed Patch in Wonderland Woods."

I found a befuddled Arianne in the Weed Patch looking for her clothes.

"Arianne, did you know that your belly button is an enormous cave and that Richard M. Nixon is living in it?"

Arianne, standing naked in front of me with her hands on her wide, flaring hips, her prominent boobs and pot tummy wobbling everytime she shifted from one foot to the other, and her ass jiggling, gave me the stinkeye. "You think I'm fat don't you?"

End of Chapter 6

This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7: "The Beginning of the End"

The people who lived in America's homeless encampments were what I called "the people of the abyss." They were the unfortunates who had fallen through all the cracks and crevices of the holy free market and ended up at the bottom of the sea of unregulated, dog-eat-dog capitalism. They were the people that I had been rubbing shoulders with for over 25 years. I saw them in Arianne's face every time I looked at her. I had been their friend, their "Princess of Thieves," and now I aimed to be their "Moses." I wondered if I had it in me to be that kind of leader. Or was I leading them straight over the edge of a cliff? I knew that they had been waiting for an opportunity to rebel. They needed a leader, and there was no one left but me. I thought of the revolt in Wonderland against the two queens when Griffin had been killed. The Jabberwock was still there, and there was no one left but me. "Why me?" I thought. A moment for self-pity, and then I pushed it out of my mind.

On the fourth of September, Hatter and I, in disguise, researched on the internet in a small café in Paris the locations of all of the big American investment banks, their secondary offices which had clones of their databases, and all of the big cloud servers which housed their online backups. We obtained lists of their overseas locations as well. With this data in hand, we were ready.

Back in Wonderland, I created a list of one hundred large homeless encampments that were located near the targets and prepared a letter explaining my plan. I put the letter on old, junk flash drives that were considered obselete because they only had two gigabytes of space. For my plan to work, I needed the cooperation of everyone in those one hundred homeless encampments. I delivered my "rebel letter" in person that night and immediately ran into recognition problems. If it weren't for my emerging from smoke portals, I think more than a few homeless encampment leaders would have thought that I was an imposter. Forty-five pounds thinner, having no feminine curves, and having a face more like Audrey Hepburn than Judy Garland, I was simply unrecognizable. Homeless encampment leaders stared at me as if I had risen from a graveyard. In a way, I suppose I had: I hadn't been seen in seven months, and the U.S. government had celebrated my death. The leaders stared at my face, and then, in a few moments, came the welcomes. I was mobbed. Some homeless encampment leaders expressed doubts of my plan, and said that most of their residents wouldn't go for it. Most of the homeless encampment leaders, however, said that their residents had been waiting for such a moment. The fact that the U.S. government thought that I was dead had opened a window.

End of Chapter 7

This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8: "The Rebel Letter"

Remember, remember the sixth of September, the day the overclass treason fell to the plot. The day we pulled the rug out from under the investor class parasites. The plan is simple: destroy the big mainframe computers in the large investment banks. Those big mainframe computers contain the databases of all the financial transactions that the banks engage in. Most of the money in the world does not consist of currency and coins. It is digital. It is created by banks out of thin air when they loan money. Destroy the mainframe computers, and you destroy the financial databases. Destroy the financial databases, and you destroy the digital money. Destroy the digital money, and you destroy the loan repayment plans. Destroy the loan repayment plans, and you destroy the ball and anchor around the ankle of every ordinary citizen in the United States. Destroy the banks and the U.S. dollar turns into the vapor that it is. The evil system of people as commodities to be enslaved by debt, used, and discarded shall be no more! Thanks be to the oligarchs for their monopolistic tendencies! There are only a few big banks that control most of the economy, so destroying all of them can be done in a single night. I will take care of the corporate backups on cloud servers and second offices myself.

I will be traveling to a specific selection of homeless encampments, including this one, in the late night hours of September fifth, and the early morning hours of September sixth. This will be the night that we steal something besides food: guns. Lots and lots of guns. And ammo.

I am back and I am pissed.

- Alice

End of Chapter 8

This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9: "The People of the Abyss"

In the late night hours of September fifth and the early morning hours of September sixth, I led ransackings of gun shops all across the U.S. I took a hit of rage potion before every gun shop robbery on the assumption that there would be at least one armed guard. The abuse of my body was horrific. Machine guns, semi-automatic pistols, high-powered hunting rifles - we stole them all along with vast quantities of ammunition. Most gun shops were protected by heavy solid metal rolling shutters. No guards. I startled more than a few of the homeless when I ripped those shutters off with my bare hands. We robbed gas stations for fuel and auto parts stores for motor oil in a few places so the fighters could create a few cases of molotov cocktails before they left for attacks. As each robbery was finished, I opened a portal direct to the nearby target bank, and the fighters were then left to their own leadership. I always left them within walking distance of their own encampments. I didn't have time to stick around to provide a return portal. I had to be quick. Robbery, attack, robbery, attack, robbery, attack. The pace was relentless throughout the night, and I was panting for breath by morning. The repeated doses of rage potion had my head spinning. And there were still the cloud servers and secondary offices to attack. I took care of those with jackbombs.

I'd be lying to say that all of the homeless encampments signed on. A few refused to participate because they believed that the chance of success was zero. They had been beaten down for so long that they thought the government was unassailable. In those cases, I sometimes carried out the attack on the bank buildings myself because it was the quickest, albeit slower, option available. In a few cases, I just skipped that planned assault because of the time factor. In the end, I didn't need to worry. Homeless encampments that I had not visited carried out their own assaults on banks and invariably included my missed targets in their attacks. I had not expected so many homeless encampments that I had skipped over to take the initiative on their own. Unfortunately, they also attacked some targets that I would never have considered, such as residential areas.

The cable news organizations were caught flat-footed and bewildered. The revolution was not televised. It was on YouTube. Thousands of videos of destroyed mainframe computers in the big investment banks went viral, and videos of a few dozen of the biggest investment bank locations burning from molotov cocktails tossed in their lobbies also flooded YouTube. The stock markets were closed for Labor Day and had to wait until tomorrow to collapse. The U.S. dollar became worthless in hours. The Chinese, sitting on mountains of U.S. digital dollars built up over the course of decades of trade surpluses with the U.S. were furious and demanded payment in gold. They sent gunships, but there was no U.S. government to negotiate with. I had made sure of that.

End of Chapter 9

This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10: "Sacrament"

To the roof of an abandoned hotel in Washington D.C. in sight of the ruins of the Capitol Building, I had brought the Jabberwock Eyestaff and a very large, flat rock. I gave myself two doses of rage potion, one in each eye, and was surprised by the result. There was no Queen of Hearts, not any more. I was Medusa. There was no blackout. No period that I could not remember. I aimed the Eyestaff directly at the ground in front of the Angel's Sword still stuck in a small remnant of the Capitol Building and fired until the Eyestaff was drained. Sharpshooters on rooftops everywhere opened fire, but I was safe behind the ventilation housing. Bullets ricocheted just beyond me by the thousands. I felt like Faith in "Mirror's Edge." Opening mental portals, I flashed from rooftop to rooftop beheading one sniper after another until I had eliminated every one that I knew of. I flashed to the ground near the Angel's Sword and tossed the flat rock onto the ground directly in front of it. BOOM! The rock launched in the air and fell straight back down. I stepped on the rock and grabbed the Angel's Sword. One tug and it was mine.

Back to Wonderland with the Sword, a quick change to a red, knee-length dress and a red beret, and off I went to an internet café in Paris to search Flickr and YouTube for any hints to the entrance to the underground bunker of the United States government. I had only to check my messages at YouTube to find my answer. I had received a link to a private video of a starving teenaged vagrant dressed in rags leading someone with a cell phone to what looked like the entrance to an abandoned subway station. The teenager continued into the tunnel which was dimly lit by skylights disguised as drainholes in parking lots above. He pointed to a heavy metal door with a series of deadbolt locks. "This is what you seek," is all he said. There had been no guards anywhere in sight in the video. No other people at all. I did consider the possibility of a trap, but the homeless teenager had obviously suffered greatly and struck me as a very unlikely ally of the government that had retreated to a bunker twenty-five years ago to financially strip the United States of everything of value.

I returned to Wonderland to retrieve my Eyestaff and Angel's Sword and opened a portal to the entrance in the video. The Eyestaff wasn't completely recharged, but it was enough to blast the first door off its hinges. There was a stairway and a second door. With no charge in the Eyestaff, I carved an opening in the heavy, metal door with the Angel's Sword. Farther down the stairway and another metal door with a series of deadbolt locks. I wondered how many there would be. I carved my way through a total of ten metal doors with a series of deadbolt locks before I saw a hallway which led to the government chambers. Another hit of rage potion, and I continued walking until I verified that this was indeed the functioning U.S. government. Secret Service agents dashed out to greet me with gunfire as I inspected the labels on office doors, and I laughed in their faces as the bullets they fired hit me and simply dropped to the floor. No penetration. I didn't feel anything. I grabbed one Secret Service agent who had unloaded an entire clip into me and ripped his head off with my bare hands. I rolled the head down the hallway. I had seen enough.

I flashed myself back to the entry to the hallway. I could have gone into the offices one-by-one chopping off heads, but I didn't really want to do that. In general, I only chop off heads when I'm being shot at. The decision of the moral course of action was something I preferred to leave to the Angel's Sword. I had once before seen that the Angel's Sword had a moral sensibility all of its own. When I had thrown it into the Capitol Building, the blade caught fire the instant it became embedded in the wall, but did nothing more for twelve hours. It gave a warning. Then the flame on the blade jumped to the building and completely covered it. The entire process was obviously intended as a warning. I wondered what the blade would do this time if I simply stuck it into the floor. I was quite willing to leave the decision of what to do with all these social darwinist tools of the oligarchy to the Sword. I hesitated only a moment, and then I stabbed the Angel's Sword deeply into the floor. A split in the floor raced down the hallway. After a few seconds, the split began to widen, and the floor began to tilt downwards into the slit at a steadily increasing angle. I saw an orange glow of what looked like lava, and it dawned on me that using the Sword to chop off heads would have been more merciful. There was to be no warning this time. The first warning had been ignored. Leaving the Sword to finish its work, I flashed out through a portal, and left the inhabitants of the underground bunker to the lava pit awaiting them. I felt no guilt.

In the world above, YouTube was full of videos of burning investment banks. Skyscrapers. The proud, penile erections of the oligarchy blazed for all the world to see. One by one they collapsed revealing the impotence of their creators.

End of Chapter 10

This story is based on the characters created my American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11: "The Mathematics of a Dream"

The hardest part of any revolution is not overthrowing the hated tyranny. It's what you do the day after you've won. Fortunately for everyone concerned, the U.S. military stayed in its barracks. The homeless bands had hit so fast in so many places that the U.S. military was unable to respond. There was no front line. No guerilla army with a centralized command. Very few dead bodies lying around. Our revolution was the first to be carried out against an abstraction: instead of warring against a government, we warred against the money system which supported and controlled the government. Money was debt. Debt was money. We destroyed the system of debt slavery. The U.S. military was baffled. What were they going to do? Round up all the homeless people and put them in concentration camps? The U.S. dollar had already collapsed. What was the point?

Some of the state governors had attempted to mobilize their National Guard regiments, but without success. When the governors made their call-up, very few National Guard members answered the call. Who could blame them? They were watching the chaos on TV. Who wanted to die to protect computerized databases of banks? Their instincts for self-preservation kicked in, and they simply ignored the call-up. Who was going to arrest them? The local police forces? The local police were too busy with all the criminals taking advantage of the chaos to arrest National Guardsment who ignored their call-up. Oh, yes, there was looting. The downtrodden, underpaid working class were everywhere looting appliance stores for refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, TVs, and computers. They looted furniture stores for beds and sofas. In some locations, the police, aware that a revolution was taking place, simply stood by and watched the looting making sure that no one shot at anyone else.

Fox news attempted to stir up a ruckus by baiting me with videos of homeless mobs entering gated communities and setting McMansions on fire. There were a few horrific scenes of firemen coming out of burning homes with dead, blackened babies in their arms. To listen to Fox News, you would think that I was personally responsible for each dead baby. I never gave Fox News a reply. You see, the homeless communities that began torching McMansions were located near gated communities whose teenagers had once engaged in the ugly sport of "torchlighting." That was when a band of teenagers would get together and go searching for homeless people sleeping alone under bridges, in the brush, or in the woods in a tent. They would pour gasoline on the homeless person until he, or she in a few cases, sputtered awake. Then they threw a match. The police did not investigate murders outside the gated communities. There was no law and order outside the gated communities. This was the beginning of homeless people congregating in encampments and arming themselves for protection. With so many homeless war veterans around, there was no shortage of people willing to become guards for homeless encampments. What did the people in the gated communities expect when they had remained silent for so long as their kids went out and killed "bums" for fun? Did they think that a day of reckoning would never come? I was sad that some groups of homeless had committed atrocities, but I held my tongue. I was no guerrilla commander, and I was in no positon to impose battlefield discipline on anyone. Compared to Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, I was a joke. I had carried out a revolution not with soldiers, but with armed mobs. The commanders were the leaders of the homeless encampments, and I deferred to them.

The outflow of refugees started almost immediately. With Fox News whipping up a hysteria over the handful of mob invasions of gated communities, the wealthy were fleeing everywhere with only a suitcase thrown into the back of their Mercedes. Well, with all of the wealth that they had stashed abroad, it's not like they were fleeing with only the clothes on their backs. As I watched Fox News on a TV in a community center that was still open, I couldn't help but think "Good riddance!" as they sped away toward the Canadian or Mexican border, whichever was closest. Some of the millionaires in Florida sailed away toward the Bahamas in their yachts. The Canadians very quickly became pissed off at the large number of Americans shoving their way across the border and limited the Americans to a two-week transit visa to find some other country of asylum. The wealthy refugees found very little sympathy in Canada as the Canadian political scene was nearly the polar opposite of American-style social darwinism. Wealthy Americans who made the mistake of fleeing across the border into Mexico found themselves in the position of a floating, bloody hunk of meat in a shark tank. It didn't take long for Mexican street criminals to strip most fleeing Americans of their all of their personal belongings - including their cars. Some Americans were marched into banks and forced to arrange wire transfers of nearly all of their wealth into accounts specified by criminals to get back a son or daughter being held hostage. Mexico was an education in social darwinism at its purest for the American refugees. There, it was the criminals rather than the richest who were at the top of the social pyramid. Anything for money was the only law that mattered. Some of the American refugees in Mexico - especially healthy young adults - left that country minus a kidney. Theft of organs was not an urban legend in Mexico.

My first worry the morning after was that it would take the homeless victors too long to get organized and put together an alternative government. I was afraid that the U.S. military would step into the gap. I needn't have worried. The primary concern of the generals was getting U.S. occupation forces out of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. They found themselves having to use the gold in Fort Knox to pay for fuel. Somehow they had access to it. They also wanted to withdraw U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia which were propping up the royal family dictatorship. It seems even generals can get weary of war. The U.S. had been involved in wars in Muslim countries continuously since 2001. One day of the government of the twelve percent being gone and already the troops were coming home. With the elite bailing out everywhere and heading for the borders, the encampment councils of the homeless became the new local governments. While Fox News screamed of the establishment of "Soviets" in the U.S., the new local governments declared all vacant houses to be public property and started moving homeless families in. This gave me the idea of taking the leaders of all of the homeless encampments that I had worked with for so long to Washington D.C. where they would form a new provisional parliament that would run the country for the next five years. I spent most of the first day after the overthrow doing just this, and marveled that the lights and water continued to work. A lot of people with essential jobs such as utility workers and hospital employees showed up for work in spite of the uncertainty. Nearly every retail store and restaurant, however, was closed. That first day was unnerving chaos, but a lot more went right than wrong.

At a heavily guarded summit of the country's homeless encampment leaders in Washington, D.C. the second morning after the overthrow, I led a discussion on what type of economic system to put into place to replace the chaos that we had created. I was in favor of the same system that we had in Wonderland, but the homeless encampment leaders were almost all opposed. They said that while such a system worked in the isolated homeless encampments where everyone knew each other, it could not possibly work on a large scale. They all said the same thing: most people would have no incentive to work. They argued that the solidarity in the homeless encampments that caused people to offer their talents for free would not work on a national scale where the recipients of people's labor were total strangers. Most of the homeless encampment leaders wanted a one-party Communist state modeled after the socialist republics of Cuba, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Chile. My heart sank at this. The opportunity existed in the United States to go further than any revolution had gone before, and I did not want the opportunity to be pissed away like the opportunity that had existed in 2009 when Barack Obama became the first non-white president of the U.S. He had the world in his hands. He could have been a historic figure like Franklin D. Roosevelt. He pissed everything away. In 2032, he was one of America's forgotten presidents, like James Buchanan. No, no, no! No socialist republic in the U.S. Even the socialist republics used money and had prices on everything. There had to be a better way.

"What if we made basic necessities all free and used a currency to allocate access to luxuries?" I asked. "What if we combined all the factories into vertically integrated combinations that sold their goods to the federal government in return for luxury credits? The factories could then distribute the luxury credits to their employees to create an incentive to work. The federal government could distribute produced necessities for free using what used to be big box stores as distribution centers. No prices. No cash registers. No locks. No theft. You can't steal what's free. Surplus goods could be bartered abroad in return for luxury goods that we weren't producing or were producing only in small quantities. People who worked in service businesses that didn't produce any goods could be paid directly in luxury credits. The goal would be eventually to move as many goods as possible, one-by-one, from the luxury category to the necessity category. We might not be able to recreate the anarchist commune of Wonderland in this world, but we could try to come as close as possible."

The homeless encampment leaders looked at me as if they couldn't figure out whether I was inspired or crazy. "What about small businesses?" one asked. "Do you propose to have all businesses government-owned? Or would people be able to run small businesses?"

"Since all goods in the necessity category would be free, I can't see any need for retailers," I said. "Small businesses that offered services such as restaurants, barber shops, beauty salons, fix-it shops, and auto repair shops would be able to exist by selling their services in return for luxury credits. So it seems that small businesses not operated by the government could exist."

"What about agriculture?" asked another leader.

"Break up the big corporate farms into as many small farms that could be family-managed as possible," I said. "The federal government would take ownership of the land and parcel it out rent-free to anyone that wanted to farm for a living. This type of system has already existed in another country. These set-asides were known as ejidos in Mexico after the Mexican Revolution of 1910 - 1920. Large collective farms never worked very well in the Soviet bloc. Our corporate farms may have been efficient, but they were destroying the soil with all their mono-cropping, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Farmers could sell their yield to the federal government for luxury credits the same as vertically-integrated factory combinations. Most of the food would be distributed for free, with the surplus being bartered abroad for goods we don't produce and luxuries. The ejidos worked for Mexico. I don't see why they wouldn't work for us."

The leader I knew as "Q" from Arianne's old homeless encampment located behind my insane asylum raised his hand and proposed a vote on the type of economic system I had just proposed. "Raise your hand if you're in favor," he said. Q raised his hand. Then another leader raised his hand. And another. And another. Within ten minutes, every hand was raised. It was decided. The United States would be the first country on Earth to make the basic necessities of life unpriced and free. Twenty-four hours later, we had the assent of the generals in the U.S. military who vowed to defer to the new civilian republic.

I went home to Wonderland and told Hatter that the "Princess of Thieves" had officially retired. Hatter took me in his arms and shed a few silent tears of relief. "Dance with me," Hatter said. And so three days after the revolution, I danced a waltz with my loyal old friend.

End of Chapter 11

This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.

Version 2


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter 12: "Nightmare"

It didn't take long for the negative consequences of destroying the nation's currency to show itself. Stripped of the ability to import just about everything from China, the United States now had to begin producing goods for itself. It was astonishing just how completely the manufacturing base of the country had been stripped. Factories that were relatively modern had been dismantled and shipped abroad. There was nothing left but antiquated factories that hadn't been worth dismantling. For more than half a century these relics of the age when U.S. manufacturing led the world had stood with broken windows and decades of dust gathering on rusting machinery. It had been so long since Americans had been accustomed to working in factories that even the oldest had not a clue where to begin in attempting to restore what had once been the most fabulous machines on Earth.

There was not one factory in the U.S. that produced clothes. Not one factory that produced shoes. Not one factory that produced light bulbs. The list of goods that we no longer produced was endless. The flight of the upper middle class had also stripped the country of most of its doctors. It was the "Solidarity Brigades" from the five socialist republics, Cuba, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Chile, that saved us. The Cubans sent doctors, the Portuguese and Italians sent experts on resurrecting antiquated, rusting factory machinery, the Greeks sent agricultural experts to aid in shifting to crops suitable for arid zones, and the Chileans sent experts in managing a siege economy. In a world of mostly rapacious, social-darwinist capitalism, the five socialist republics managed siege economies that attempted as great a degree of self-sufficiency as possible. They had no one to trade with but each other. The capitalist states of the world had embargoed them, and the social democratic states such as the Scandinavian countries, France, Germany, and Canada, had been bullied and intimidated into not trading with the socialist republics. Canada allowed their citizens to travel in Cuba, but trading goods was forbidden.

Agriculture became the one bright spot. Apportioning small plots of agricultural land to anyone who wanted to farm and providing them the basic farm implements had the effect of greatly boosting the production of grains and vegetables - and greatly reducing the quantity of meat. Shoveling grain into animals to produce flesh for carnivores became a frowned-upon practice that was regarded as wasteful. Every schoolchild was taught how many pounds of grain it took to produce one pound of meat. Even more shocking was the amount of water it took to produce a pound of meat. Anyway, with all that grain and all those vegetables, hunger was wiped out within six months of the overthrow. There were no food shortages. Carnivores suffered a bit - meat was considered a luxury. If you wanted meat, you had to go out and shoot it. Well, maybe it was time that the city dwellers understood once and for all that eating meat involved killing. Perhaps going to the grocery store and buying animal flesh had become a bit too sanitized for people to realize what they were actually doing. Farm families, of course, always knew where the meat came from. Sometimes dinner even had a name.

The porous border became a major problem. The expatriot billionaires were not about to quietly accept having what they regarded as their own private property being yanked out from under their precious spreadsheets. The once warred-upon Mexican drug cartels became allies of the expatriate American oligarchy. Money can buy anything. Mexican drug cartels sent infiltrators across the border into the U.S. where they unleased a campaign of suicide terrorism the likes of which hadn't been seen since the Palestinians had disgraced themselves blowing up Israeli schoolchildren. Poor Mexicans sold their lives on the promise that their families would be provided for. In a land of desperation and starvation, the list of volunteers willing to kill themselves to provide for their families was endless. Nowhere in the United States was safe. Subways, railroads, airports, government buildings, city councils, the list of targets was endless. Not a single day went by without a terrorist bomb exploding somewhere in the contiguous 48 states. Winning the revolution had been a cakewalk. Surviving the siege that came soon after was a nightmare.

Like the establishment of the Soviet Union, the establishment of the Second Republic in the United States took over a decade. The terrorists funded from abroad waged a relentless campaign of sabotage and demoralization. It wasn't enough to keep blowing up factories multiple times after they were up and running, the terrorists waged a campaign of violence directed at children to make the adults lose hope in the future. The provisional government, after months of dithering, finally decided that there was no choice: the United States built a new "Berlin Wall" on the southern border with Mexico and created a "death strip" a half-mile wide on our side of the border. Anyone who made it over the high concrete wall with a barbed-wire top still had to survive a half mile of vibration-sensitive land mines. Digging under the wall was not an option to get around the obstacles. The vibration-sensitive mines exploded at the slightest hint of digging or disturbance. Even tumbleweeds, birds, and small animals occasionally set off a mine. The wall did significantly reduce the amount of terrorism in the U.S., but it did not come close to eliminating it. On the advice of the Cubans, the provisional government set up a full-blown police state in the U.S. There was no gulag, but any contact with oligarchs from abroad landed citizens in prisoner-of-war camps. The federal and state prisons which the new government had recently emptied of all but violent prisoners sadly found a new use. The idealism of the first months died a sudden death. In the space of a single year, the new republic became a land of fear where people looked over their shoulders and watched what they said. The Cubans said it was unavoidable. Every revolution has to deal with its implacable enemies. All we could do, they said, was dig in our heels and wait for the old privileged class that had fled abroad to die off. The price of freedom from exploitation was the loss of personal liberty and constant vigilance. Even so, watching the state and federal prisons that oh-so-recently had been emptied of drug users, prostitutes, and grocery store shoplifters fill up again with "enemies of the state" took a piece of my soul. I kept reminding myself that it was necessary for the revolution to survive, but my heart was breaking.

End of Chapter 12

This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter 13: "The Venus Project"

Six months after the revolution, I went back to the underground tunnel leading to the U.S. government bunker to retrieve the Angel's Sword. The gaping open slit to a live volcano was still there providing an eerie orange glow to an otherwise lightless area. I switched on a penlight and pulled on the Sword. It slid out of the ground for me as easily as a knife through cake. The open volcanic slit slowly knitted itself shut. Except for the glow of the penlight, I was surrounded by pitch blackness. I made my way back up the stairs hoping I would never visit this place again. I now knew that if I used the Angel's Sword for a supernatural purpose, I would have to retrieve it the old-fashioned way. Whatever the Sword had done would stay in effect until I pulled it out of its perch.

Arianne finally asked me the question that I had been awaiting for twenty-five years. "If you can't open a portal to places you can't visualize, then how did you open a portal to the vestibule of Hell when you kidnapped the Senators?" My answer raised another question that even I did not know the answer to.

"During training, Caterpillar showed me what could happen if I tried to open a portal to someplace without knowing exactly where and what it was. He opened a portal to the vestibule of Hell. I recognized it instantly and never forgot it. The real question is where did Caterpillar learn the location of the vestibule of Hell?" I let this sink in on Arianne. I could tell in her face that she was wondering just who Caterpillar really was. I asked him precisely that question once myself. Caterpillar declared that he was the "Guardian of Sanity" in Wonderland. He refused to be any more precise than that. Sometimes I think he's one of those creatures you find in Terrestrial Paradise in Purgatory who has taken up residence on Earth. I'm inclined to think that my friend and ally Gryphon was also from Terrestrial Paradise. I'm hoping someday to see him again.

The exiled American oligarchs' arrogance and sense of untouchability was their undoing. Even in countries that adhered to the social darwinist international order, there were laws restricting doing business with certain countries and organizations. The Mexican drug cartels were considered terrorist organizations, and the oligarchs' failure to hide their doings with the Mexicans resulted in mass sweeps and jailings in Europe, Japan, and India. If the exiled oligarchs had had the good sense to be discreet in their dealings with the Mexicans, they might have remained free. They could have simply lived the good life off their investments and ignored the world around them if they had wanted, but they insisted on regaining their lost properties in the United States. The concept of "enough" was unknown to them.

The Europeans had good reason to despise the Mexican drug cartels. Since the collapse of the plutocracy in the United States, the Mexican drug cartels had lost their best drug customers, and switched their marketing and sales to Europe, instead. The Europeans, with their own drug wars to fight, cracked down hard and began to fill their prisons with drug traffickers. Only the socialist countries in Europe had found a way to defeat the drug traffickers.

Do you really want to get rid of the drug trade? It's easy. All you have to do is legalize the sale of recreational drugs, and the astronomical profit margins crash to earth almost instantly. Using a nonconvertible currency does the rest.

A visit to the Cuban doctors in Havana who had treated me got me a clean bill of health. They informed me that I had fully recovered and would not need any further checkups. According to their scales, I had gained another seven kilos which put me up two dress sizes. It was enough to give me back my face and some modest feminine curves. I looked like a normal person again. I had dragged my old size twelve dresses out of storage and they fit perfectly. They were the same dresses I had worn when I met Arianne for the first time and when I kidnapped the U.S. Senate twenty-five years ago. I didn't mind not being the voluptuous, buxom sexpot that I had been at all.

Arianne seemed to mind, though. I could tell that Arianne missed her soft, squishy teddy bear. She was just out of luck. I had started swinging on the vines in Wonderland Woods again - something I hadn't done in over two decades. I had been too heavy and the vines all broke. I had gotten used to being lighter on my feet and engaging in physical activities that had once been impractical. I could once again shinny up a tree without my boobs and ass getting caught on branches. It was rare for a branch to break underneath me. Arianne was just out of luck. I was enjoying not being voluptuous.

I do admit that there were occasions when I missed having a big chest and even bigger ass to throw around. Like when I walked past the gnome village. The gnome men didn't stare at me any more. I missed the little wankers staring at my jiggling ass until they turned blue and fainted. I felt like the sexiest woman on earth when they did that. Oh, well…

The Cuban doctors also discovered something that I already instinctively knew. Before the anti-terror squad filled me full of holes, I had had nine rage potion glands scattered throughout my body. They looked like tiny replicas of the adrenal glands. Hatter said they functioned in concert with the adrenal glands. Nine rage potion glands. A CAT scan at my checkup revealed that I now had over 100 of those rage potion glands. The Cuban doctors believed that they hadn't found them all yet. The anti-terror assholes had tried to kill me and instead had only succeeded in making me more than ten times stronger. Arianne reminded me that I wasn't Supergirl. I didn't need her to tell me that. The scars on my body were a constant reminder. Everytime I took a shower or got dressed, I got a reminder of just how lucky I was to still be alive. Fortunately for my vanity, the scars were quite faded and not so obvious. I think I could thank the rage potion for the fading of the scars as well as my survival.

To my great relief, Arianne actually lost some weight. Down one dress size to a fourteen. She looked absolutely perfect: plump, voluptuous, curvaceous, sensuous. But not fat. For awhile there, I was worried that she was going to inflate into one of those blimps that you used to see at Cheapmart. I started to wonder if, deep down, I was just as shallow as Hatter and would reject her if she went over a certain size. I was grateful not to have to find out.

Things in Wonderland may have been going well, but the situation in the world uptop was mixed at best. The Chinese and Russians were pissed at finding themselves stuck with a metaphorical mountain of worthless American currency. They sent gunboats to U.S. ports along the west coast. They demanded payment in gold for the trade debt that the U.S. had been running up for decades. The provisional parliament decided that it was better to pay off the Chinese and Russians than risk a war, and split all of the gold reserves between the two according to the percentage of debt each held. The gold didn't cover the entire debt, but after being told "Take it or leave it," the Chinese and Russians both took what they could get and went away. The provisional parliament didn't care about the gold at all. "Thank heaven they didn't demand payment in grain!" commented one representative. It seemed that the revolution had succeeded in teaching a more rational conception of value. Americans were no longer obsessed with shiny metals and amassing big numbers on bank statements and stock portfolios.

In the new economy, it was astounding how many service occupations had nearly disappeared or completely disappeared. The sheer valuelessness of such activities was now apparent to all. Cashiers, bank tellers, loan officers, accountants, insurance agents, actuaries, advertising copywriters, public relations managers, security guards, fast food restaurant counter workers and kitchen employees, retail clerks, hotel clerks, and so many other occupations either diminished greatly or vanished outright. In a world where everyone enjoyed a measure of economic security, the insurance industry vanished overnight. So did the payday loan sharks and mortgage brokers. Good riddance to those! So many jobs had existed solely for the purpose of putting cash into the hands of distant, unseen investors. These jobs produced nothing of lasting value and were soul-destroying for the poor unfortunates who toiled for a paycheck and nothing more. Workers needed to feel that their daily activities mattered in the long run. Who was really hurt when a fast food restaurant employee failed to show up for work? Other than the other employees who were stuck with picking up the slack, no one but the distant, unseen investor. If the bank accountant didn't show up to grind his numbers, who really was hurt? Again, only the fellow employees who had to pick up the slack and the distant, unseen investors. People started to realize that those distant, unseen investors were, in reality, simply a new type of slavemaster.

I wondered why there had been no violent revolts against the billionaires in their mansions and vast estates in the past. Deep down inside, I thought that they were murderers. Depriving people of necessities because of inability to pay was a passive sort of murder. What great writer was it who spoke of "the banality of evil"? The evil of the billionaires had become so mundane that most people yawned at it and simply accepted it as part of the social order. What made this bullying of the financial type so socially acceptable? Why had so many of us become numb to the suffering of others? Oh, yes. Now I remember. The writer's name was Hannah Arendt. She posed the possibility that evil was simply a function of thoughtlessness and mindless acceptance. To be evil, all you have to do is be a mindless drone, sleepwalking through life and letting yourself be herded by manipulators.

The provisional government finally sorted out the establishment of a formal government. There would be a parliament of 501 representatives chosen by a lottery using social security numbers for people aged 35 to 60. Every year 100 or 101 of them would be replaced. The term of service would be five years with everyone who completed service being exempt from further terms. I was thrilled that there would be none of the old-style electioneering in the new republic.

The new republic's jail cells began to empty out again. Lawyers and judges found themselves twiddling their thumbs. Those against whom evidence had been purely circumstancial were simply released. Those whose innocence seemed questionable were given a choice of exile in a foreign country or taking up residence on one of the new republic's remaining island possessions. Quite a few chose exile over a remote island. Those who were clearly guilty of conspiring with the oligarchs got no mercy and were moved to the newly rebuilt prison on Alcatraz Island. Everyone on Alcatraz had a life sentence. The new republic had banned capital punishment - even for treason.

The drones that I had feared so much were gone. Armed or unarmed, they were gone. The provisional government decided that they could not justify the invasion of privacy with mechanical spies in the sky. It went without saying that the risk of killing innocents with armed drones was totally unacceptable.

A place that was the exact opposite of the old order was arising from the debris in Detroit. The old city, its ruins really, was being razed so that a new, planned city could be created. This new city was to be circular in design with light rail running like the spokes of a wheel from the city center to the outer rim. Inside the outer rim, concentric circles of elevated light rail tracks completed the public transportation system. Inside the city, you would be able to get from anywhere to anywhere by riding the trains and walking just a bit. No cars would be necessary. Not even buses. Public taxies would exist on call for the handicapped who were unable to use the rail lines. The center of the city would be located under a dome and would house computerized control centers, schools and a university, libraries, communications centers, a hospital, and child care facilities. Buildings located along the inner concentric circles would house cultural centers such as theaters, museums, and concert halls. There would also be restaurants and inns for travelers. Some shops such as bookstores, coffee shops, and internet cafes would also be located in this area. In the central concentric circles would be research centers. Restaurants and other amenities would be located nearby. Just beyond these circles would be located the agricultural zones, greenhouses, and hydroponics facilities where people would also work. Next would be the residential circles, and along the outer perimeter would be outdoor recreational facilities and clean energy generators such as windmills, solar batteries, and geothermal power stations. Everything would be available to people without cost. One would not even need luxury credits to live in the city, although places to spend such currency would be permitted inside the city. The whole point of this new, planned city, designed by a group of futuristic architects calling themselves "The Venus Project," would be to eliminate the chaos and waste of traditional unplanned cities. I could not wait to see the city when it was completed.

End of Chapter 13

This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) holds the copyrights.

Version 2


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter 14: "Requiem"

The revolution came too late. This sense of impending doom had been haunting me since the wave of terrorist attacks that came after the overthrow had died out. The Chinese and Russians had been bought off with the gold stored in Fort Knox. It was cheaper to just pay them off than to fight them. So what was the trouble? The malarial death zones were spreading. Each year the zones spread out a little further horizontally and spread both north and south just a few more miles. Each year, the degree of spread increased a little.

One day I asked Hatter while he was in his laboratory why it was that I couldn't remember robbing any grocery stores in North Dakota or Wyoming in the last few years before the revolution. Hatter stared at me in astonishment.

"Alice! I'm astounded at you! Sometimes the gaps in your knowledge of the world above really take me aback." Hatter saved his work and shut down his computer. "Come take a trip with me. Let's go to Wyoming." Hatter took out his bong and filled it with Caterpillar's smoke portal powder. A match and a few puffs and a hazy, swirling, multicolored portal drifted in front of us. Hatter stepped through first.

We stepped out into what could only be described as a dustscape. Hot and arid, there was not a single green plant visible. It sure didn't look like autumn. I slowly turned in all directions and spied only fracking drilling rigs looming out of the landscape. There were no other landmarks at all. The shifting dust, which reminded me of sand dunes in the Sahara Desert, had obscured any roads that might have been present. The sky was crystal-clear cerulean blue and cloudless. Hatter took me to several other locations in Wyoming. There were a few buildings half-buried in dust in addition to the fracking drilling rigs. Sand drifted in their open, glassless windows. Everything else was the same. Dust shifting in the wind. No roads visible. Only the fracking drilling rigs rose up out of the landscape in most directions. I thought of Ozymandius.

Hatter took me to North Dakota. More of the same. Hatter explained what I had seen. "Alice, fracking fluids contaminated the groundwater for the entire states of Wyoming and North Dakota. Global climate change stripped away what little rain the Great Plains states got. What you saw was the result. Wyoming and North Dakota are completely lifeless. Not even cacti will grow there. Did you notice that there were no tumbleweeds?"

Hatter took me into his laboratory and showed me some scientific formulas that he had been working on. "My best current estimates," he said. He started up a program which showed a slowly twirling 3D globe. "This program, using my current formula, projects the spread of lifeless zones all over the planet. Global climate change is steadily increasing the size of deserts which are unable to support human life. The malarial death zones are also steadily increasing in size. If you combine the two, add in areas destroyed by the poisoning of groundwater by fracking, and project into the future using current rates of exponential growth, climate change, malaria, and groundwater poisoning will render the entire earth unfit for human habitation by 2100. Civilization will die much sooner than that. Spreading starvation and social darwinist attitudes among wealthy elites ensure that for most people, life will become a kill-or-be-killed propositon. Cannibalism will be the norm for the last fifty years of the human species. We hit the point of no return sometime back in 2012 when wealthy elites denied even the existence of global climate change. They refused to tolerate anything that cut into their profits from oil and gas drilling. Their selfishness doomed the human species. When the malarial death zones spread up into the areas above Wonderland, we will need to seal Wonderland off from the world above to prevent mosquito larvae from entering Wonderland. I am already making preparations for that day. We are fortunate that all of Wonderland's water percolates through layers of soil before getting here. The soil prevents mosquito larvae from getting into Wonderland via water. The only possible entrances are the Rabbit Hole and the Looking Glass of Pale Realm. The White King won't like it, but we will have to destroy that anique mirror in his study. It has a twin in an old house somewhere in England. It would be a good idea to destroy the twin mirror as well." I watched the continents on the 3D globe on Hatter's computer screen slowly cover with red depicting uninhabital zones.

Hatter took me back to a desolate, wind-swept dust desert located somewhere in North Dakota. "This is the way much of the world ends," said Hatter. There were not even fracking drilling rigs visible in this spot. "This is what happens when the groundwater is poisoned and there is no rain." North Dakota had once been endless plains of wheat. Then, in the dim twilight of evening, Hatter and I stood there watching the dust devils dance across the barren nothingness.

The End

This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.

Version 3


	15. Chapter 15

Chapter 15: Author's Notes

"Wastelands" completes the timeline for the alternate universe stories of a modern, American Alice. There is one story, "Things That Came," which takes place chronologically after "Wastelands." I doubt that there will be any more alternate universe stories. I can no longer justify the amount of effort and time that the stories take to write.

"Wastelands" was perhaps my first attempt at science fiction and was an homage to Jack London's "The Iron Heel." Several of the chapter titles were taken from "The Iron Heel." I seriously doubt that anyone noticed. "The Iron Heel" is from that portion of Jack London's work that is rarely taught in high schools or universities.

For a long time, I thought that my portrayal of Alice as a modern-day Robin Hood was unique. Imagine my surprise when halfway through writing "Wastelands" I stumbled across the comic book hero "The Green Arrow." I do think that my modern American Alice would make quite a comic book heroine.

I will never write a fanfiction for "Madness Returns." Quite a few of the "Madness Returns" fanfictions strike me as "trollfics" which are written with the deliberate intent of offending. Sadism, domination, near-rape scenes. It isn't the explicit sex of the scenes which bothers me. It's the apparent joy of the authors in portraying scenes of such viciousness and cruelty.

-Nikki Little on November 24, 2012


End file.
